Negroponte: Laptop for Every Kid

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Negroponte: Laptop for Every Kid

TUNIS, Tunisia – If tech luminary Nicholas Negroponte has his way, the pale light from rugged, hand-cranked $100 laptops will illuminate homes in villages and townships throughout the developing world, and give every child on the planet a computer of their own by 2010.

The MIT Media Lab and Wired magazine founder stood shoulder to shoulder with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to unveil the first working prototype of the "$100 laptop" – currently more like $110 – at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society here Wednesday. The Linux-based machine instantly became the hit of the show, and Thursday saw diplomats and dignitaries, reporters and TV cameras perpetually crowded around the booth of One Laptop Per Child – Negroponte's nonprofit – craning for a glimpse of the toy-like tote.

With its cheery green coloring and Tonka-tough shell, the laptop certainly looks cool. It boasts a 7-inch screen that swivels like a tablet PC, and an electricity-generating crank that provides 40 minutes of power from a minute of grinding. Built-in Wi-Fi with mesh networking support, combined with a microphone, speaker and headset jack, even means the box can serve as a node in an ersatz VOIP phone system.

Under the hood, it's powered by a modest 500-MHz AMD processor, and uses a gig of flash memory for storage. But the key to building it cheaply enough to educate the world's children is an innovative, low-power LCD screen technology invented by Negroponte's CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen. "The manufacturers are the toughest audience, and they stopped laughing in September," says Jepsen. The machine is expected to start mass production late next year, and the governments of Thailand and Brazil have already said they're serious about placing $1 million orders for their school kids. Others are close to lining up.

Wired News broke through a cloud of admirers to chat with Negroponte about the future of the little green box that's captured the imagination of normally staid world leaders.

WN: Did you expect this kind of reaction?

Negroponte: I expected this reaction, actually. Partly because this kind of meeting is normally not that interesting. And I don't mean that quite as pejoratively as it sounds. You've got a lot of public figures making short statements, you've got a lot of booths which are NGOs, which are passing out pamphlets. I went to the Geneva one (in 2003), and being a star here is not something you should take too seriously.

WN: What do you think the appeal of this idea is?

Negroponte: The appeal is obviously the cost, and the people realize that you can do one laptop per child. When it sinks in, they realize that you would not propose one pencil per classroom. It really does fall into a different class.

Clearly (though) in some countries even $100 spread over five years is too expensive. So in those countries we have to find other means to pay for it than the normal education budget. But at least half of the developing world – certainly half the population, probably half the countries – could afford the $20 per year.

WN: How did you come to do this project in the first place?

Negroponte: We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road. What put us over the edge was that it was possible to do it. A combination of things that had been invented – display technology like electronic ink, mesh networks for communications, just a number of things that happened in the context of the Media Lab – (indicated) that the time was right.

Also telecommunications in developing countries is moving apace and things are happening – so it doesn't really need us anymore, that's going to happen. So focusing on the device and one laptop per child was kind of the natural thing to do.

WN: Why the emphasis on open source? Why not use a donated version of Windows or OS X?

Negroponte: Because you want the kids to develop software.... It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.

So the open source and the $100 laptop are sort of flip sides of the same coin, and you want the kids to contribute to it....

WN: So you're shipping this with development tools installed?

Negroponte: Yes. Absolutely.

WN: We're talking about C compilers and Make and the whole programming environment?

Negroponte: Yup.

WN: One could argue that it's better to give them something that has more mainstream commercial appeal.

Negroponte: Now be careful there. Fifty percent of the servers on this planet are using either Linux or some kind of Unix derivative.... So 20 percent of the world's servers are already using what I would call perfectly mainstream software. And there are open-source approaches to it that are working just fine. It's not mainstream on the desktop, I'll admit, but we'll make it mainstream on the desktop. We'll push that over the edge.

WN: Is the goal literally to make computers available to every child that wants one in the world?

Negroponte: It's every child in the world whether they want one or not. They may not know they want one.

WN: Do you have any thoughts on what the long-term impact of giving all these kids a programming environment and an open-source ethic might be?

Negroponte: Those are two different questions. Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way – and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things – is one of the best ways to learn. Particularly to learn about thinking and algorithms and problem solving and so forth.

And providing the tools for some people – it's going to be a very limited subset (who will use them) – to develop software that will be redistributed and versioned and so forth out into the world is also important. It's part of the whole open-source movement.

WN: You're going to be unleashing a whole new generation of open-source programmers, who otherwise would never, possibly, have gotten their hands on a computer.

Negroponte: I hope so. I hope we unleash half a billion of them.

WN: What, if anything, has been challenging about bringing this idea to national leaders?

Negroponte: Bringing the idea to national leaders has been easy, partly because I know some of them, or they know me.... It's almost easier for me to get in the door than Michael Dell or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, even though they're more famous, richer or more important. It's easier for me to get in because I'm not selling something.

Once I'm in the door, the idea takes seconds for people to get.... People get it quickly, they sleep on it, very often they wake up the next morning saying, "Oh my god, this is a really big change." The whole idea of harnessing the resources of children themselves to participate in education is a pretty big one. A lot of people don't think about it....

It's a short story. It's also a pretty good story, and there aren't too many good stories in the world right now. There's no angle to it that's bad.... And with the possible exception of the circumstance in which (the government) is so poor that the $100 can't be reached, it really isn't a balancing act here. Why would you not do this?

WN: Here's a potential downside: How long is it going to be before somebody writes a computer virus that takes advantage of this mesh network to start spreading?

Negroponte: You've got to be careful here. That's a little like saying you ought to not teach people how to read and write because they could write messages to each other about how to build a bomb. Anything you tell me that has to do with education, I can tell you how it's not a good idea because they could read a book on how to make a bomb or something.... I'm more worried about the reverse.

I (do) want to make sure we are virus-proof. That you can reboot, so you don't get infected in a way that's really cataclysmic.

WN: Now that you've unveiled your prototype, what are the next steps? What do you face in the coming months?

Negroponte: The next steps are big. We face two things rights now. They're happening right as we speak. One is we have five ODMs looking at this, to build it. They're looking at that machine, those specs, and they have to – in the next seven days – come up with real bids. Let's assume we pick one, then you go through a very complex stage of building prototypes. It just doesn't just go from zero to 1 million units overnight. It's a very complex process.

The second thing we're doing is we're talking to a more limited number of brand-name manufacturers – you can guess them all, make a list and you'd be 100 percent right – who we are approaching with the idea that they make a commercial version of it. For themselves. We're not trying to do anything commercial, but if they do, and they – whether the right word is license it, or partner with us ... then we get three benefits from that.

One is an engineering partnership, obviously with somebody who's been doing this. Second of all, wider distribution – so this would be not just kids in school, but it could be commercial and retail channels.

And the third thing you get, within the limits of international law, you could have cross-subsidy. You could have commercial machines sold for $225. Let me pretend $25 of that went to One Laptop Per Child, and that lowers the cost of the laptop from $100 down to $75.... There are anti-dumping laws that make that not as simple as I just said.

WN: Is it too early for me to preorder one?

Negroponte: You have nobody to order it from. I cannot tell you – I even get checks in the mail from people who are ordering them. The fact that it's not going to be on the commercial market is something that really bothers people, because when they see it, a lot of people who see it say ... "I want to be able to buy one." Well, the truth is, if you could buy one it wouldn't be $100, it would be $225. And you'd still buy it.